It is requested that the original six month time period be extended an additional six months. Sometime in 1952, the agency began testing LSD on individuals, presumably CIA volunteers. It indicates that the truth was being suppressed even as it was coming to light. [44]A detailed and documented chronology of the events surrounding the Frank Olson case can be found in Appendix A,Project MKULTRA,The CIAs Program of Research in Behavioral Modification, Joint hearing of the Select Committee on Intelligence & the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, Washington, DC 1977; the primary source documents can be found inCIA Documents Concerning the Death of Dr. Frank Olson, Center for National Security Studies documents collection, Box 8, Number C-35, National Security Archives, Washington, DC. Meanwhile the CIA had become interested in the possibilities of brainwashing. Proof of this, which came to light many years later, was the contract it made with a Canadian psychiatrist in Montreal, Dr Ewen Cameron, to experiment illegally on his patients with LSD and possibly other drugs for such purposes. or not in something more nefarious than an accidental death. Acid Dreams. According to Eric Olson, his father was eliminated because he posed a threat to the agencys top secret drug experiments, including some that may have been conducted abroad. page 10, [63]Memorandum for the Record,Visit to Project (deleted),Central Intelligence Agency, MKULTRA document 5-11, May 11, 1953, [64]Eric Olson email to author, January 25, 2001, authors files, [65]Testimony of Admiral Stansfield Turner, op. But like any secret program, the Armys biowarfare operation was run on a need-to-know basis, and weapons development was not his bailiwick, Jones said. By the time the priest and the ambulance came, the stranger on the sidewalk was dead. Social historians and political satirists immediately labelled these events a great historical irony, and Eric repeated these words to me through gritted teeth because he doesnt appreciate the fact that his fathers death has become a fragment of an irony. His talk there, wrote Forrest Robinson, featured a highly literary rendering of a psilocybin trip that he took with Timothy Leary a year earlier. However, when my parents returned to London several weeks later, my father became anxious, and he and my mother returned to Moscow. The doubts raised by the incoherent Colby documents, and by the many other anomalies in the story, led us to have Frank Olsons body exhumed and a forensic investigation performed. According to Feldman and other CIA experts, it is still continuing today under an alphabet soup of different cryptonyms. Already in 1976 theNew York Timeshad observed that the Colby documents were elliptical, incoherent, and contradictory. TheTimeswrote that: Taken as a whole, the file is a jumble of deletions, conflicting statements, unintelligible passages and such unexplained terms as the Artichoke Committee and Project Bluebird that tend to confuse more than enlighten. He apparently worked for HumRRo. He went though a moral crisis, but he was in too deep and they couldnt let him out., We continued watching the home video. in 1975 and had brought Frank Olsons LSD dosing to public attention. (The CIA assassination manual). Accidents What was the nature of Olsons duties? Still, the veterans say, Special Operations stood apart. Zuleka Fraser. So to that extent we did do something that was not kosher. The American soldiers who claimed to have committed biological warfare were apparently manipulated using Artichoke techniques. [60], The documentary puts forward its strong evidence that Olson was eliminated by the CIA because he wanted to leave the government after witnessing the real world use of MKULTRA interrogation techniques, including drugs and hypnosistechniques that have been terminal in nature. When Eric asked him why, Gottlieb explained that his ecological sensitivity had made him aware of the dangers of paper overflow. This crisis occurred, it is important to emphasize, several months prior to the LSD drugging at Deep Creek Lake. Dick Russell, author of a recent book on the Kennedy assassination titledThe Man Who Knew Too Much,uncovers new evidence to support the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was a product of MK-ULTRA. As we talked about the old cabin Railey looked sad. Sometimes a collage-maker will place two images in very close proximity and then, pointing first at one image and then at the other, insists that Thishas nothing to do withthat.. The Vollum strain found in the early Detrick papers is first replaced by a Vollum sub-strain called M36, produced by the British biological weapons program by passing the Vollum strain through a series of monkeys to increase its virulence. Frank Olson was a civilian biochemist working for the Army Chemical Corps Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. In Alexa, Eric found a technological blank slate -an open field offering new and interesting problems to solve. Contact Us Tim Carroll, APR He was taken instead, by Gottliebs deputy, to the office of the former Broadway magician John Mulholland, who probably hypnotised him, and Frank probably failed that test too. Nevertheless, the attorneys prepared a draft of a letter to him. But, at the same time, he was quite obviously suffused with another, even more compelling, desire. Self-defense may be argued if the victim has knowledge which may destroy the resistance organization if divulged. Click image or button bellow to READ or DOWNLOAD FREE Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance. Absolute reliability can nearly always be achieved at a distance of one hundred yards. After the Soviets 1949 show trial of the Hungarian prelate Cardinal Jzsef Mindszenty, this pursuit turned into a race. The room was simply too small for his father to have gained the speed to take a running plunge through the window. No matter how gentle the language, this was to be a guide for agents in the field to perform dangerous, provocative and even lethal acts. He decided to investigate on his own. In the Agencys terminology, the ideal tactic is to intercept a question before it has a chance to be stated, thereby shutting off curiosity before a direction of thought can be formulated, articulated, and acquire momentum. Abdominal wounds were once nearly always mortal, but modern medical treatment has made this no longer true. The first relates to the speed at which Dr. Olson exited the window of Room 1018A. What little else they knew came from a small article in their local paper: Army Bacteriologist Dies in Plunge from NY Hotel. In order to assure his family of Civil Service benefits, the CIA had his death officially recorded as a classified illness.. Armond D. Pastore Why Mulholland was going to Chicago for the Agency remains uncertain, although there is some evidence that he was going to take part in secretly assessing the claims of Andrija Puharich claims that related to electronic systems and telepathy. Im one of the had-help people., So is James Starrs, a George Washington University forensic pathologist who examined Olsons exhumed corpse in 1994 and called the evidence rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide., Based on that finding, the Manhattan district attorneys office opened a homicide investigation in 1996. Alarmed by these horror stories, federal and state authorities moved to ban the drug. Not only had Mulholland made a living from the execution of these skills, he had gained a reputation as conjurings most accomplished teacher. had not turned over to my team Olsons fingerprints or dental records. Finally, all of this information was reassembled to form a chronological narrative. Feldman was the sort of guy who didnt have too many scruples, said Dan Casey, a retired FBN agent who worked with Feldman in San Francisco. But they might have found other ways of using Mulhollands skills, in addition to or beyond hypnosis. The speaker then stated that the need for amnesias was particularly great in operations work. He was assured by two of his colleagues that work was continually being done in an effort to produce controlled amnesias by various means. I am exceedingly skeptical of the view that Frank Olson went through that window on his own, Starrs said at the end of his investigation. Perhaps we will never know what really happened to Frank Olson, but the important thing was that Eric had achieved closure. I must say, he messed up. But this is far more than a family story, which is why for many years it has been avidly followed by many people in this country and others. He also believes that it was a violation of the Nuremberg Principles. The Strange Story of Frank Olson., What Did the CIA Do to Eric Olsons Father?, Now the man in the pencil-strip suit began his counteroffensive. The CIA hushed up Olsons death. (Like everyone known to be directly involved, Lashbrook is now dead.). But Frank Olson had a bad trip, perhaps giving rise to the legend that if you take LSD you believe you can fly and you end up falling out of windows. The investigator had interviewed William Sargant, the English psychiatrist and consultant to British intelligence (and author of an early book on brainwashing). He was intensely patriotic and served on the Committee for National Morale. They say he jumped. This made it easy to peddle the ludicrous fairy tale cover story in 1975, a story that in hindsight resembles The Emperors New Clothes.. To judge my credibility in accepting this claim I begin with: PERSONAL BACKGROUND: A psychiatrist testifying in Sirhans defense said that the accused assassin was in a trance when he shot Kennedy, albeit a self-induced one. The pad, as White called the CIA safe house, resembled a playboys lair, circa 1955. He said they went so far as to take a life lives, definitely more than one. Little information pertaining to the suicide of Frank OLSON was found in the collection of materials made available by DDS&T. The Agency has deflected the question of national security homicides in a double maneuver. That is argot from Yiddish and will advance nothing youre interested in. It remains unclear why Olson was the only one to be seriously affected by the LSD dose. An effective technique has been devised for the use of a pair of sub-machine gunners, by which a room contailning as many as a dozen subjectgs can be purifico in about twenty seconds with little or no risk to the gunners. It covered how to administer pills, liquids, gasses and loose solids surreptitiously. Miniccino adds, So if Frank Olson expressed serious doubts about the MK-ULTRA project to Sargant, then he signed his own death warrant.. This is the only example of which I am aware where the obvious problem of security in the wake of some kind of psychological breakdown is stated clearly. I had never had a conversation with him about anything that might have involved moral values. He told me that. The other divisions there, created during and after World War II, focused on large-scale biological attack, said Walter, who completed a quadruple major at Mount St. Marys College in Emmittsburg and went to work at Fort Detrick in 1951. His deputy, Richard Helms, had a different personality but similar roots. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. The year was 1955 and the analysis was from a report of the agencys Office of Scientific Intelligence titled Strategic Medical Significance of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD-25).. Eventually you would come to San Francisco. There he was briefly interviewed by a stenographer before returning to spend another day at the Statler Hotel. In Sargents view Olson, primarily a researchbased scientist, had witnessed in the field how his arsenal of drugs, etc. A request for a re-review of these files is still pending. Dr. Leviskys calculations revealed three separate fracture sites: one was in the upper body, particularly the ribs and shoulders where Olson must have collided with a construction barrier at street level; another in the lower legs as they impacted the sidewalk with the forces of velocity having traveled upward to cause a book fracture in the pelvis (opening it like the pages of a book); and dissipating the upward thrust so as to protect the vertebral column from any dislodgement; and thirdly, a horizontally aligned fracture to the right temporal and parietal bones of Dr. Olsons skull, occasioned in all probability when his head hit the sidewalk after his feet had first struck the pavement and he just toppled over. . Why had he placed a most curious telephone call only to another C.I.A. That night, in Room 1018A, with Lashbrook in the bed by the door, Olson was calm: he washed out his socks and underwear and went to sleep. BED OF NAILS When the family, in due course, met with Colby, who later reported that this had been among the most difficult assignments he had ever had, he offered them 150 pages of redacted documents that he claimed amounted to the entire file that was relevant to their concerns. This is what we do. White thought they were all assholes. By early 1953, Gottlieb had been given control of the Agencys newly minted mind-control program, MK-ULTRA. The US government moved immediately to show how sorry it was for what had happened. Nils and Eric had discussed with me the possibility of cremating the remains of their father. If the jury, too, found the evidence of murder compelling, then Saracco requested that it should hand down indictments for murder and conspiracy to murder. A scanning electron microscope, coupled with energy dispersive X-ray, disclosed the presence of a number of elements, one of which was silicon in a rather high concentration. The trip to the cinema didnt help Franks mood, and the next day it was suggested by some colleagues that he go to New York to visit a psychiatrist. There was the Eiffel Tower. Gottliebs appearance, moreover, revealed little about the standards and procedures used in experiments by the CIAs private contractors. For just under half a century the death of Frank Olson has been a weighty burden for the Olson family. Since 1953, Eric Olson has heard more than one explanation for his fathers mysterious death. You cant go out with a colleague for a drink and get a little intimate without being told The Story. The Very Best MenFour Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA, This is a storythat no one wants to know. Dr. Gibson also told me about research he had done using hypnosis to create very precise age regressions in a patient. 9.59 A significant portion of the human population within selected target areas may be killed or incapacitated., Setting an imaginative tone for what would follow, the report listed potential targets: ventilating systems, subway systems, water supply systems stamps, envelopes, money, biologicals and cosmetics contamination of food and beverages.. In any trial, it may become apparent that we are concealing evidence for national security reasons and any settlement or judgement reached thereafter could be perceived as money paid to cover up the activities of the CIA.. 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